Skype and EasyBitsGo

I’ve had Skype on my computer for a good long while.  I use it on occasion to video chat with my Colorado daughter and her kids.  It’s fun and free, you know?

This morning when I turned on my computer, I noticed that I had a new program installed in my taskbar titled “EasyBitsGo”.  I didn’t install it, so I did a little checking and found that Skype now installs this little gem automatically, without permission, on computers owned by users who have done the unthinkable—Using Skype.

It took me a cool hour to remove this thing.  My understanding is that it’s a piece of game software—always problematic in my view.  I didn’t ask for it, I don’t’ want it, and Skype should be ashamed.

Should you need to know how to remove EasyBitsGo from your Windows XP machine, here’s what I had to do:

-First, I completely removed Skype via the Control Panel add/remove programs utility.
-Next, I re-started my computer.
-Then I went back to the Control Panel add/remove utility and removed the EasyBitsGo program, but it took only a microsecond to finish.  Not nearly long enough to actually remove anything.
-I restarted the computer again.
-I went to C:\documents and settings\all users\application data and deleted the EasyBitsGo folder (which had not been removed using the add/remove utility as I had suspected).
-I re-started the computer again.
-I went to start-run, entered regedit.exe, and once in the registry editor, went to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software, found the EasyBits folder there and deleted that entry.
-I went to start-search to find EASYBITSGO.EXE-364DAFD6.pf and ezPMUtils.dll and deleted both of these files.
-I did a final re-start of the computer.

None of this harmed my computer in any way, and the only thing that’s actually gone that I had personally loaded is the Skype program.  Which I won’t miss.

Absolutely shameful behavior.  Skype can KMA.

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